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The Los Angeles Central Library was set ablaze by an arsonist on April 29, 1986, an event captured in an excellent recent book by Susan Orleans. The photo above shows the library on fire, and below, a glimpse of the burnt stacks, showing charred remnants of books.

“Even after total resurrection in 1993, when those who stuck it out returned to dear old Central, it seemed like a terribly unreal nightmare. Just to ponder 200,000 books destroyed by the act of a madman is bad enough, but to have worked with and touched these objects created by deep thought and intellectual struggle makes the sadness all the more haunting.

“Irreplaceable numbers of hard copy periodicals, drawings from patents, historic maps, fine art prints, photography negatives and newspaper archives were turned into ash or mush by the water that inexorably seeped down the stacks and into the basement. The bottom floor of the venerable landmark became a waterlogged graveyard of collections.”

What does this have to do with us quilters today? Because recently someone set fire to our collective digital library, also known as Craftsy.

Unlike the LA Central, Craftsy (which as of today is changing its name to BluPrint) has no funding from any state or local governments. It is a business, and in that sphere, money — or keeping your business viable — reigns. So while it’s not surprising that they might make changes to keep it profitable (and no one begrudges them that), too many of us, when looking for our favorite patterns this week saw this:

A friendly, grandmotherly tone with the “Oh Dear!” but because of the lack of punctuation, the sympathic murmuring we all say (“Oh, dear!”) was turned into a dimishing description. They can get us back on track, they claim, as “things aren’t going as planned.” No kidding.

It’s my turn coming up on Gridster Bee and I was reviewing past bee blocks I’ve seen and made for others, trying to audition one for this month. Time after time, I clicked on the links I’d carefully imbedded in blog posts, only to see the Oh Dear! Craftsy notice.

I had earlier received the notice that I was one of the designers they decided to keep, but waited to see what would happen. My collection of nearly 15 patterns was reduced to this one pattern:

I had some revisions in process, so was able to upload them, but doubt I’ll be allowed to do more. But more importantly, some of my favorite pattern makers are gone:

This one was mine.

I would have liked some notice that they were going to ransack our digital library, burn the books and torch the shelves. I imagine some of you would have liked that, too. Couldn’t they have tagged our patterns, letting us know they were headed for the dustbin, and then a week later, we could have taken them off the site ourselves? Would it have been feasible for them to start charging us and letting us keep our “store”? I would have been fine with that, for of course we should pay our way.

And…why did this happen the week before Christmas? It felt like one of those “release-the-horrible-news-on-Friday-and-maybe-no-one-will-notice-by-Monday” sort of things.

For awhile I’ve had patterns up on PayHip, which also satsifies the VAT issue payment. To search PayHip, use Google. Type in “quilt patterns payhip” and you’ll see a large listing of creatives already on that site. Another way to the patterns is through direct links, such as the one to the right on my blog.

PayHip OPQuilt site

For now the takeaway is: download anything you like for, without warning, it may suddenly go up in smoke.

Postscript regarding Craftsy/BluPrint: I have created a folder on my own hard drive, and downloaded into one place all the patterns I’d purchased on Craftsy which I also uploaded to the Cloud (I use Dropbox). I’d suggest doing the same.

Riverside Sawtooth, the name I’ve given for this original block of mine, has been finished — or at least the top has. It is a compilation of bee blocks from the Mid-Century Bee, as well as several of mine. I started making these in the Alison Glass blues fabric, but trying to describe what color of blue that was to people all over the United States was a challenge: I finally settled on “painter’s tape blue.” I like this quilt not because of that color and that block, but also because it’s a scrappy two-color block. Have a bunch of greens, or pinks, or reds that need to be gathered together into a quilt? This would work great.

Through the process of arranging and cullling and making more blocks to balance colors, I had enough blocks for another small mini.

The genesis came from seeing a similar antique quilt, but that maker had done a more traditional construction (and sorry–there was no name on that old quilt). I wanted to see if I could make it as a block, the sawtooth incorporated into the construction process. It took me several weeks of working on it, then testing it. I wrote up the pattern and sent it as a test block out to my beemates and incorporated their tips and tricks into the pattern wording. Now thoroughly tested, I tweaked the pattern and at long last, have it available for download in my shops at Craftsy and PayHip (for EU customers). The pattern includes lots of detailed photos and walks you through it the process, so it’s good for anyone’s set of skills, beyond the what-is-a-rotary-cutter-and-how-do-I-use-it barely beginning level.

Here’s another mini full of full dotty blocks. I loved working in this tonality of blue — hey, I love blue in any tonality — but the inspiration of Alison Glass’ fabrics kicked me into finding blue fabrics that coordinated with hers. The large quilt (72″ square) is in the line-up to be quilted, and then I’ll probably label it and get it up on the 200 Quilts list, but for now, I wanted to make it available to you, if you want to try your hand at an updated fun version of a block.

I’ve been working on a few more patterns and I’ll roll them out one by one over the next several weeks, as I get the typos expunged, the photographs completed and then uploaded for purchase.

Create

"The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing: it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills." ~Arthur Koestler